Free Muscle Medicine: The Revolutionary Approach to Maintaining, Strengthening, and Repairing Your Muscles and Joints by Rob Destefano, Joseph Hooper Page B

and not suffer any ill effects even though they’ve been out of the game for years or decades. If you’re serious about not hurting yourself, you should spend two to four weeks on conditioning and technique before you ever set foot on the court or in the batter’s box. Every workout should include ten to twenty minutes spent on technique and coordination. For instance, softball players need to spendtime in the batting cage and running the base paths. Basketball players might do a “hopping” drill like this: balance on the left leg and hop forward, landing on the right leg and balance for two seconds; hop back onto the left leg and repeat five to ten times. Runners should do lateral movement exercises (for instance, skip sideways without crossing your legs) to build up the muscles that running doesn’t develop. Tennis players and golfers should build in time for regular “touch-up” sessions with a teaching pro. Rarely do topflight tennis players and golfers suffer from tennis elbow and golfer’s elbow (see chapter 10 for that discussion). These overuse injuries are usually the result of an amateur’s bad form, which can and should be corrected.
    Strength: Fifteen to forty minutes, two to four times a week.
    Building a Strength Program
    Here, we provide a menu of exercises; you build a program that works for you. But some general rules do apply. Unless you’re working toward a specific goal with a personal trainer, there’s no need to do strength workouts more often than every other day. You’re stressing muscles that need time to rebuild and rebound. In general, we’d like you to do at least one exercise from each of the three groups— upper body, core, lower body—and an all-body exercise if you’re so inspired. Don’t push yourself to the point where your good form breaks down. That’s inviting injury, not protecting against it. A useful rule of thumb is, stop when you feel you’ve got two more repetitions left in you (e.g., if you could squeeze out seven push-ups, do five for one set). As for the number of sets per exercise, two or three sets would be ideal, but one set is a lot better than none. People’s goals will differ. Some people will want to reach a “base level” of fitness and maintain it from there. Others will want to continue to get stronger, which means, at some point, they’ll need a wider selection of exercises to stress the body in different ways. Find a good trainer!
    Upper Body
    In life, the one weight that we must be able to handle is our own body. That’s why we love the classic body-weight exercises for all-around fitness such as the push-upand the pull-up. Forget how many you can do, perfect form is everything. Even if you have been doing these exercises for years, you can always reassess and tweak your form.
    The ideal push-up: Assume the familiar prone push-up position. Your feet should be about shoulder-width apart with your hands braced on the floor, next to your shoulders. The shoulders and upper back should be pulled back and “down,” not hunched up or rounded. First make sure you can hold that raised push-up position: arms straight, face down with neck in a straight, “neutral” position, back flat, abs held in, no sagging the hips. You may feel your ab muscles shaking after a few seconds! Then slowly lower your body (count to three) as one unit, leading with your chest, until your elbows are at ninety degrees and hold for a count of one. Come back up to the starting position, counting one or two. Inhale on the way down, exhale on the way up. Your abdominal muscles should be firing the whole time, helping to keep your body straight. Repeat as many times as you can comfortably manage with good form. Bad form is letting your midsection drop, not going low enough, or moving your hands forward and hunching your shoulders. The motion should be slow and controlled, not fast and sloppy.

    Lots of people can’t do one proper push-up. Doing push-ups from the knees-down